


this heart is broken (it's all yours)

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Post-Episode: s01e15 Yes Men, oneshot with additions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2016-09-14
Packaged: 2018-07-24 15:25:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7513423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>En route to the Triskelion for repairs, Jemma attempts to help Ward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Over on tumblr an anon requested biospec + “How about you put that down and we talk?”

“You’re lucky,” Jemma says and almost immediately regrets the words. The events of the last two days were anything but lucky for Ward; that his physical injuries are minimal can only be described as a small mercy.

“It’s okay, Simmons,” he says. His hands shift on the front of his shirt and she stills, making sure he’s done before continuing.

May put him through one of the glass walls in the lounge during their fight, a move that could have killed him had physics not been on his side and would have resulted in severe damage to his back were his tactical gear less well-made. She sends a silent thank you to Agent Koli, who invented this particular fabric three years ago (and annoyed Fitz to no end by doing so), while she drags a comb through Ward’s hair. The shirt may have spared his back, but there are plenty of glass shards still threatening to cause him harm.

“I _am_ lucky,” he says, and she hopes the slight strain on his voice is due solely to the awkward angle he’s forced to lean back at. “Any other team might’ve just shot me and been done with it.”

She pulls away, horrified. She’s had her eyes opened a great deal over the last few months as to how SHIELD treats its field agents but surely no one would be so callous as to murder an agent for circumstances beyond his control. (A small voice reminds her that Coulson was ordered to throw her from the Bus. But that was different … wasn’t it?)

“You can sit up now,” she says, setting the comb aside. She’d love to make a few more passes through to be absolutely certain she’s got it all, but at this point she’s likely doing him more harm than good.

He sits up, obviously relieved, and moves to take off his shirt now that he doesn’t have to hold the collar closed to protect his skin from falling glass. “Thanks,” he mutters, already halfway across the lab.

“Wait!” she calls and winces again at her tone. He doesn’t turn around, only stands with his bruised back to her while he bunches up the shirt in his hands. “Why don’t you put that down and we can talk?”

“Simmons,” he groans more than says. “I think you’ll understand why I _really_ don’t want to do that.”

“I know,” she says quickly. “But if you talk to me, then I can recommend you not be sent to a therapist once we reach the Triskelion.” They’re making a quick stopover, just long enough to have the damage to the Bus - both from the broken glass and the dents Sif left in the hull - repaired. But if it’s deemed necessary after what he’s been through the last two days, Ward will be ordered to see a councilor while they’re on base. She imagines he’d like to avoid that.

He turns just far enough to give her a once-over, expression wary as though she’s some wild animal. She tries to smile reassuringly, though it’s difficult under the circumstances.

“Okay,” he says finally and, on his way back to the stool, drops his shirt into the tray she used for catching glass. He shrugs once he’s sitting. “Might as well let you do that physical you’re dying to while I’m here.”

She hurries to grab her supplies. She was going to let him off the hook, for once trust his own assessment that he’s fine without one, but if he’s insisting, she’s not about to turn down the offer.

A heavy silence settles as she lays out her suture kit, gauze, and bandages - all standard for treating specialists - and she finds herself struggling to find words to say. If she’d had time to plan, she would have looked up the typical questions posed to trauma survivors, but she hasn’t planned this and any previous research she’s done on the subject of emotional therapy feels woefully inadequate.

“Are you okay?” Ward asks, shocking her so badly she nearly drops the gauze she’s using to pat blood off his tiny lacerations.

“Oh, yes, I’m only trying to think of where to start.” She pats his knee fondly on her way around to his other side. “And you’re the one we’re here about.”

He smiles, and it seems to relax every part of him. “I meant, were you hurt? Earlier.”

“Oh. No. We were-” She tosses the gauze away just for the excuse to turn her back to him. “Skye and I were locked in the med-pod. No harm done.”

“I saw you running around. You didn’t…?”

She shakes her head. “No. I was only bait. Fitz fared far worse than me, I assure you.” Right now he’s lying in his bed upstairs, nursing a terrible headache from the blow Coulson dealt him. With any luck he’ll be up by the time they reach the Triskelion and can at least get some manly pleasure from showing off his black eye.

“Okay. Good.”

The silence threatens to return, and Jemma allows fear of it to drive her to ask one of the many questions she really shouldn’t. “What did she mean?”

Ward cocks an eyebrow.

“Skye got into the Bus’s security feed, so we heard some of what was said before you fought with May.”

His face goes very still, and she busies herself sterilizing the small cuts that are too little to waste bandages on.

“She said something about- well, she made it sound like you knew more about May - about all of us, really - than we’d be comfortable with and told it all to her. But the way she said it-” she lifts her eyes to his face and waits for him to meet her gaze- “that you _see_ more.”

Ward’s gone tense and his chest is still as stone while he holds his breath.

“You see color, don’t you?”

As far as Jemma knows, only half the team sees color. May and Coulson both do, though neither will talk about their soulmates no matter how drunk they are, and Skye claims to have seen color all her life. She theorizes it means her soulmate had the basinet next to hers at the hospital and will never be found; she always says it in a lighthearted way, but Jemma knows she longs to find her match as deeply as she does her parents.

Ward however, has never said anything about seeing color. In fact, just last week Skye demanded her purple sweater from her room and, according to her complaining, Ward came back with a green one.

“Yes,” he says, the word tearing from him slowly.

She leans back, setting her hip against the lab bench to give him some space. “Was it-” she hesitates briefly- “a result of her influence? Making you think that you were in love?” Fitz didn’t say anything about it, but then Fitz hasn’t said much that wasn’t whining about his very minor head injury since he woke up.

He shakes his head once, sharply. “No. No, I’ve been able to for a while.”

“Why-” There are a million ways to finish that sentence and she settles on simply repeating it. “Why?” There are strict protocols in place regarding agents and their soulmates. SHIELD has to be informed as soon as possible about any encounter so that they can vet the individual and ensure their safety.

He stares at her for long seconds, likely wondering if he can trust _her_ of all people with a secret such as this one. Probably he’s not so much studying her as imagining her running to Coulson to spill everything to him.

But she won’t.

There are plenty of secrets - far more than she’s proud of - that Jemma is incapable of keeping, but she’d never dare to share one that truly matters. And soulmates certainly fall into the latter category.

Finally he attempts a small, joyless smile. “She doesn’t.”

“Doesn’t what?” Jemma asks, confused by the lack of context.

The answer occurs to her almost as soon as she’s asked however, and she can’t help her horrified expression when Ward supplies, “Doesn’t see color.”

It’s not unheard of, but that doesn’t make it any less tragic. For the connection to be unreciprocated is (Jemma’s earlier words come back to her, turning her stomach in knots) considered the worst possible luck.

“I was undercover when it happened,” he goes on, trying to be aloof in that way Skye does whenever the subject comes up, “she never even met the real me.”

She lays a hand on his arm. “Maybe that’s why! Maybe if you could only meet her as you truly are, she’d see.”

He looks at her hand, and she realizes suddenly that uninvited contact is not the sort of thing he should be experiencing after what’s occurred. She makes to pull away, but he’s faster, pinning her hand in place with his much larger one.

“Maybe,” he agrees while the edge of his thumb slides over her fingers. “I tried to let her see the real me, little pieces here and there, but…” His hand drops and he looks towards the cargo bay. “I guess it was never enough.” He doesn’t say it - because he never would - but she can hear what he truly means in his tone: _he_ was never enough.

And then Lorelei came along and gave him some twisted version of the connection he thinks he’ll never have. Jemma’s not often one for violence, but she thinks she could inflict some on that woman if ever she were given half a chance.

“And maybe it never would’ve been,” he goes on, even more false levity in his tone. “I would’ve put her in danger for nothing. It’s better this way.”

“I’m so sorry, Ward,” she says. There’s no way to express how deeply she feels it - and the hug she’d like to attempt with is clearly off the table - so she only adds, “No one will hear about it from me. You have my word.”

He looks on her with gratitude - and perhaps some genuine fondness; he may not have his soulmate, whoever she is, but he has friends and that’s not nothing. “Thanks, Simmons.” He grabs his shirt and shakes it out to get rid of some of the glass before leaving.

She expects, after the day he’s had and that confession on top of it, that he’ll stay in the cargo bay for a while, vent his lingering frustrations on the punching bag. Instead he only pauses briefly beside it to shoot her a look she can’t even begin to make sense of before heading upstairs. She wants to call out to him again, bring him back so that she can say something,  _anything_ , but she has no idea what could possibly make what’s happened to him - be it Lorelei or the loss of his soulmate - better and so stays silent as he goes.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my defense, you people asked for this.

There is a moment - when the sound of the gunshot is still echoing, when the machines half a world away are beginning to flatline - when Jemma’s vision … changes. She’s not certain how to describe it. Everything looks exactly the same but for that brief moment, less than the length of her own heartbeat, everything is somehow _more_.

There’s too much happening to truly dwell on it - Ward is being taken into custody and the hunt for Peterson is being resumed and it’s all a mess - but she spares a thought, just one, to reason that it must have been adrenaline. Some result of her shock and excitement impacting her vision.

With all that’s going on, as well as her own determination to look into the GH-325 while she’s here, she makes a mental note to research the phenomenon later if she has time.

She doesn’t.

She’ll regret that.

 

 

+++++

 

 

She will not regret it when it happens again at Providence. There, it doesn’t just happen for the length of a heartbeat, it _continues_. But even that she can’t notice because she’s preoccupied by the scene that’s been made so much … _more_ by whatever’s happening to her.

Ward is standing in Agent Koenig’s office and Agent Koenig … he …

His eyes are bulging and his mouth opens and closes like a landed fish and his fingernails have turned dark and are bloodstained from tearing at his own throat because …

Because Ward is holding a cord around his neck.

Ward’s eyes meet hers over Koenig’s shoulder. “Jemma,” he breathes. She runs.

She doesn’t see where she’s going or have any true design, her only concern is to get away. In the back of her frantic mind is a single clear, firm thought: Ward is HYDRA.

How can Ward be _HYDRA_?

Arms wrap around her when she slows to take a corner. Under other circumstances, she might be embarrassed by the frightened, pathetic sound that escapes her, as it is she can only be horrified by Ward’s voice at her ear, shushing her.

“Shh, shh, it’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”

His tone and his words are both utterly wrong, not at all in line with how Ward has ever spoken to her before. (But that’s not true, is it? He spoke to her just like this in the ocean as she came awake, but she was too caught up in her recent brush with death and her general state of disorientation to notice it at the time. And of course later she chalked it up to heat of the moment, some specialist trick meant to calm her.)

She fights him, uses every trick she’s ever learned for fending off a larger attacker, but of course he knows all of those and taught her many of them himself.

“Dammit, Jemma,” he snaps as one of his arms disappears. She has a brief hope she might be able to escape if only she can get out from under the other, but it fades fast when the cold barrel of a gun presses to her neck. She stills instantly and feels what might, absurdly, be a kiss to her hair. “I’ll see you soon, okay?” he says as though that should be a comfort and then, in the newly unfamiliar flash of an ICER’s firing, her world goes black.

 

 

+++++

 

 

It’s unfamiliar because it’s in color. She realizes as much the moment she wakes and from there it’s nothing at all to realize that’s what she saw in the Hub that day, that’s why Koenig looked so utterly wrong as he struggled to hold onto his life. The first person she ever saw in color and he was _dying_.

She presses a hand to her mouth to stifle a sob.

Ward is a murderer. He’s a traitor and a killer and- _oh_.

“Jemma.” The reason for the lack of restraint on her becomes quickly obvious as Ward appears at her side. She’s in the med pod, though still in her same jeans and blouse so obviously she hasn’t suffered any trauma she can’t recall.

Only the heartbreaking ones then. Good. That’s … well that’s that, she supposes.

Ward takes her hand off the bed and she snatches it away. The relief that was shining in his eyes only seconds ago evaporates into something frightfully earnest. “Jemma.” He keeps _calling_ her that, she wishes he’d stop. “Do you-”

He looks to the window as though expecting to find someone there. She doesn’t know who it could be seeing as Koenig is dead, May left the base, and the others are all in Portland. She wonders if it’s Garrett.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he says finally, meeting her eyes again. “I’m sorry I had to shoot you but I didn’t want you hurting yourself.”

“Yes,” she agrees, allowing acid to drip into her tone, “that would be terrible.”

He frowns, that adorable little turn of his lips she always thought meant he was growing fond of the team’s antics. God, she’s a fool.

“I know you don’t understand,” he says, “but you will.”

“You’re HYDRA.”

He drops his head, but she sees it for what it is. He’s annoyed by her reaction rather than ashamed of what he’s done. “Yes.”

“You’ve been lying to us since the beginning, working for Garrett.”

He draws in a breath, straightening up. “Yes.” No, definitely not ashamed.

There’s more, the final lie that has something like a scream begging to be released from her chest, but she holds it down with the same determination she used to keep working when she was dying. She survived that, she can survive this. But she won’t put it to words, she won’t give him that.

He studies her and she forces herself to meet his gaze steadily for fear of somehow letting him know what’s changed between them. His eyes, she thinks absurdly, are a lovely color. Not quite the black they appeared before, like his hair, but so very close as to be distracting.

He moves to brush her hair from her face. Though the motion is slow, she still flinches when his hand comes near her. Only a few hours ago those hands were covered in Koenig’s blood, she can’t bear for them to touch her. He frowns at her, obviously displeased. “I told you, you’re safe.”

She makes a sound that might be a laugh and pushes back into the pillows, into the corner of the bed farthest from his reach. She draws her knees to her chest and watches him warily. “Are we still at Providence?”

She knows they’re not. Down here, there’s always a slight hum in the walls that indicates the plane’s in flight.

“No,” he says. “We’re waiting for the decryption to complete.”

She presses her forehead to her knees. Of course he came back for the bloody hard drive. Months of research into everything from that first 0-8-4 to the GH-325, even her own theoretical adjustments to the Centipede serum, meant in hopes of helping men like Mike Peterson, should they ever be able to save anyone else. Soon HYDRA will have all of it.

She lifts her head and seems to surprise him; he appears to have been in the middle of reaching for her. “And then?” she asks.

He tips his head, considering her once more. She wonders if he’s thinking of their conversation after he was released from Lorelei’s control, of the hope she gave him then that perhaps his soulmate would be able to see color if only they could meet again while he was truly himself.

She has never before been so sorry to be right in a hypothesis.

“And then we meet up with Garrett,” he says. There’s something different about his tone, it’s no longer as familiar as it was. She hopes that means he’s given up hope. “He’s eager to get his hands on your research.”

“And me?” she asks.

His aloof expression softens. “I told you, no one’s gonna-”

He looks to the window. Mike Peterson stands there, so still and solemn she would not be surprised if he turned out to be a statue that’s been there all along. His injuries and modifications look so much worse now that they’re laid bare in full color. She blinks back tears.

“We’ll be there soon, you slept most of the flight,” Ward says. “And don’t bother trying to escape, we both know there’s only one way off this plane and you’re not taking it.”

She cringes at the reminder of her fall, and for a moment he looks almost as though he’ll apologize. He turns away.

“Get some rest while you can,” he orders before locking her in.

Mike doesn’t spare her even a glance when he follows Ward into the lab and for that Jemma is grateful. She knows what’s on the other side of the eye that’s been forced on him and knows he’s ignoring her as a small mercy.

Once they’re gone, once she hears the door to the lab open, she rolls over in the bed, presses her face to the thin pillow, and sobs.

 


End file.
